What really was Call to Power?

JH - I agree totally about city placement in Civ3, but my point with the trade routes was that if you took how important strategic resources are in Civ3, but made the trade routes piratable (with severe political consequences to the pirating civ) things could get real interesting....

a lot of potential here IMO.

CTP was an undertested, buggy piece that seduced the hordes of Civ fans ravenous for a sequel to Civ2.

The modded Call to Power 2 is, in my opinion, a superior experience to Civ3. There is more of everything, and the atmosphere is much more enjoyable.

Originally posted by Maccabee
CTP was an undertested, buggy piece that seduced the hordes of Civ fans ravenous for a sequel to Civ2.

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PTW was an undertested, buggy piece that seduced the hordes of Civ fans ravenous for an XP for CivIII. I'm glad C3C has broken the trend of sorry followups...

I can't speak for CTP2 (wasn't going to waste money on it, didn't have the money anyways), but I can compare CTP and PTW. PTW was also buggy, I agree. At least it is far more able to be modded. The contortions I endured to play
CTP on a simple world map with programmable starting locations was purgatory. I caught myself working harder to create a simple scenario, than I did on my job. Granted, I'm no programmer, but I shouldn't have to be to enjoy what the game claimed.

Another thing I appreciate about CTP is that I could actually play a game to the end. I've never even come close with C3. Don't get me wrong...I enjoy playing C3 but when it starts taking 5-10 minutes between turns I end the game. And no...I will not play on a small map with 3 other civs, I didn't have to with CTP and I won't with Civ3. That mid to late game turn lag has to be the biggest flaw in Civ3. It's a testament to the fanaticism of Civilization fans (of the Sid strain) that it's not a fatal flaw.

I hear you, Dog. There are some things they could have done to speed up turns in the late game. Although, sometimes CTP wasn't so good either, if you had the GlobeSat wonder.

CTP I & II were awesome. I loved them. I played those for years and had a blast.

They have around 60 civs.. each with a female and male leader. They have really good wonders, graphics, units, and gameplay.

In fact, I still play them. I would say CivIII is better, but CTPII is almost up there. Check them out, they probably sell for real cheap.

I bought CTP because I wanted to be able to play Civ on Linux (yes there is FreeCiv but it seems geared more for MP than SP. I probably didn't give it enough of a chance but just found much of it too alien to really get into it, particularly the public works thing, so I just got used to keeping a Windows partition around for when I wanted to play Civ. I've heard that the modded CTP2 was supposed to be pretty good and look forward to trying it out once the source is compilable, hopefully with winelib.

In have wasted lots of time on CIV, Colonization, CIV II, CIV III...
And I have wasted money on CTP. I gave it away to my brother within a month or so.

Originally posted by calgacus
The modded Call to Power 2 is, in my opinion, a superior experience to Civ3. There is more of everything, and the atmosphere is much more enjoyable.

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Not to mention that the CTP2 AI is no longer a pushover either in the Modded game(s)... It'll give you a run for your money.

The Modders in CTP2 have a huge advantage over civ3 modification, and that is a scriptable language (SLIC). It appears that Conquests is starting to move in that direction, but CTP2 was there 3 years ago.

There are pros and cons to both games. Personally, I find that CTP2 (Modded) is a lot less tedious than civ3 (PW vs workers - true unit stacking/grouping vs pseudo grouping that is limited to the same type of unit - stackable combat vs one-on-one combat - I could go on and on...), and there is a great deal more depth in government choices, tile improvements, tech tree decisions, as well as a more balanced and realistic combat model that uses HP to eliminate the civ3 tank-vs-spearmen debacles.

But it's all based on preference...

Sorry to necro this post. But just wanted to add my 2 cents.
My first civ was CTP. I saw the image on the box and I saw hoplites (they were actually phalanxes).

It was my first TBS game ever. And... after 1 hour i went back to play the Age of Empires: RoR DEMO. My cousin taught me the basics and so I started to play and enjoyc CTP.

After several years I played a lot ctp and civ 3. Tried out Civ 4 and Civ 5 (vanilla). Did not like a lot.

IT: things in CTP:

- You could sacrifice a percentage of your total production to get PW points(Public Works). You could spend PW points to build in 1-2 turns several roads/mines/farms.
- Armies needed to be supported. Basically the had an upkeep cost in production. BUT, you could sest 3 status: full at war (100% upkeep/efficiency) till at stand down (10% upkeep/50% efficiency). That was really an interesting feauture.
- Build sea tile improvement! And you could "upgrade" the tile improvements during the ages. That was really cool.
- Cinematic Wonders. They added flavour to the game.
- The trade was messy but it was cool to see the trade's routes and pirate (destroy) them.
- The combat was a little messy too but you needed a "first line" and a back-up line. Ranged units had Ranged attack. You could not charge with 9 (or 12 in CTP2) Warriors against full archer army. You would easily be wiped out.
- Space! You could build freaking space cities. If you found the "wormhole" you could start to build the "xenoform laboratory" and try to achieve an Alien Project.
- Unconventional warfare. Spies, eco-terrorists, lawyers. Unbalanced stuff but was a great concept.
- Barbs could upgrade. If a city reached a low happiness it would join the barbs cause. You could see barbs cities spawn tanks!

Pangur Bán;1346540 said:

The modded Call to Power 2 is, in my opinion, a superior experience to Civ3. There is more of everything, and the atmosphere is much more enjoyable.

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Can you - or as your post was from 2003 somebody else who still likes CTP - please tell us what mods you mean and provide download links to these mods?

I have CtP1 and 2 and I agree that there are some concepts in these games that would have the potential for substantial upgrades in the Civ series. The backside of (unmodded) CtP1 and 2 in my eyes was the very weak AI and the not so easy way to produce new unit graphics with that sprite-tool. I also didn´t like that Fascism was such a wonderful government in CtP.

On the other side in my eyes the non-miltary units in CtP (and some other features) were great and there was a lot of creativity behind creating such units. The enslaver and the lawyer in CtP were some of these units, that I tried to "translate" to Civ 3 and they are an interesting part of my C3C mod CCM.